Stalin’s ‘killing fields’ yield 30,000 bodies

‘‘Children of the people who were executed have been trying to find out about the fate of their relatives for more than 60 years,’’ director of research center at St Petersburg chapter of the human rights group, Memorial, Irina Flige said. ‘‘It was a monstrous crime by the Communists that is still being obscured at an official level.’’

These burial sites usually are found by accident or from the efforts of private groups such as Memorial, not by any organised attempt by the government to confront crimes of the past.

In the most recent case, the discovery owed to the determination of Flige and her late husband, Venyamin Yofe. About 7,000 people in the region around what was then known as Leningrad disappeared in Stalin’s purges from 1930 to 1936 and nearly 40,000 more were killed from August to November 1937, the peak of the terror, the Memorial said.

Thousands were buried in a cemetery discovered a decade ago in Levashevo, but relatives of victims had long believed that Stalin’s executioners took most of the political prisoners to the Rzhevsk army range in Toksovo, just north of Leningrad, where they were shot and buried. In 1998, Yofe, a former dissident who spent three years in a prison camp in the 1960s, narrowed the search to a wedge-shaped section of the range stretching about 40 miles in length.

Four years of searching failed to yield anything, and Yofe died this year unable to prove his claim. Flige continued his work until the first bones were found in August. Investigators plan to conduct tests to determine the age of the remains and intend to continue digging until winter.

Ultimately, a memorial will be constructed at the site. ‘‘The legacy of the gulags has not been overcome in the 21st century,’’ Flige said. ‘‘The victims have remained unknown and unmourned.’’ (LATWP)